Strengths
- Of the cryptocurrencies tracked by CoinMarketCap, the best performer for the week was Floki, rising 260%.
- Smaller cryptocurrencies are starting to pull ahead of record-setting Bitcoin as traders bet the tokens are next in line to set all-time peaks. An index tracking the bottom half of the largest 100 digital assets is up about 60% over the past month, beating the 56% advance in Bitcoin, writes Bloomberg.
- Investors dumped a record amount of cash into BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF while the cryptocurrency surged to an all-time high. The iShares Bitcoin ETF pulled $788.3 million on Tuesday, its thirty-seventh consecutive inflow. The fund has now swelled to $11.5 billion in assets, writes Bloomberg.
Weaknesses
- Of the cryptocurrencies tracked by CoinMarketCap, the worst performer for the week was Kaspa, down 11.90%.
- Spain has banned Worldcoin for up to three months, reports Reuters, drawing a sharp rebuke from Sam Altman's company, amid perceived privacy risks from the venture which scans irises in exchange for a digital ID and free cryptocurrency.
- MicroStrategy led cryptocurrency-linked stocks lower in premarket trading on Tuesday, reports Bloomberg, as Bitcoin’s blinding rally took a short breather.
Opportunities
- Pantera Capital is raising money from large investors to buy deeply discounted Solana tokens from the estate of bankrupt digital-asset exchange FTX. Pantera is seeking funds for the Pantera Solana fund which has an “opportunity” to buy up to $250 million worth of SOL tokens from the FTX estate, according to Bloomberg.
- Bitcoin miner Core Scientific has struck a deal to provide data-center services to CoreWeave, a cloud computing company that’s among the hottest startups in the AI race. The mining company will supply up to 16 megawatts of data-center infrastructure to CoreWeave under a multi-year contract, writes Bloomberg.
- Bitcoin rose to $70,000 for the first time this week, even as traders appear to be shifting their attention elsewhere for higher returns in fringe tokens know as meme coins, writes Bloomberg.
Threats
- An appeals court in Montenegro has rejected a lower court’s decision to extradite disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Do Kwon to the U.S. to face trial on fraud charges. In a decision announced on its website the appeals court agreed with Kwon’s lawyers that the February 21 ruling was flawed and sent the case back to the lower court for a new trial, writes Bloomberg.
- Coinbase says “a small subset of” users may see intermittent zero balance across their Coinbase accounts and latency across pages, according to Bloomberg.
- Chinese crime syndicates are using cryptocurrencies to launder billions of dollars, including money raised from helping supply drugs to the U.S. or scamming American victims. These gangs are exploiting the decentralized nature of cryptocurrency markets to evade the grasp of Chinese and foreign authorities, according to an article published by the Wall St. Journal.
